Liberté, égalité, fermeté?

France’s interior minister is showing his toughness, but not always his good sense

THIS has been a busy summer for the French police. Beyond the usual seasonal wave of petty theft and dealing with the broken French of pick-pocketed tourists, some more intractable problems have emerged to distract them.

Starting in late July, Roma (Gypsy) encampments on the outskirts of many French cities have been progressively dismantled in dawn raids. As many as ten camps in or around Lille, Lyon, Marseille, La Courneuve and Paris have been bulldozed, and over 1,000 Roma have been displaced. Some of those living in the camps have been repatriated to Romania. Others are taking their chances on the streets.

Meanwhile in Amiens, a sleepy city in France’s north that suffers from high unemployment, violence exploded in the night of August 13th. Rioting youths injured 17 police officers and burned a nursery school to the ground. It was a rather glum end to François Hollande’s first 100 days as president.

At the centre of the government’s responses to both issues is Manuel Valls, the interior minister, who has evoked the need for fermeté (firmness) in dealing with social problems. The rioters in Amiens may have legitimate grievances, but the French state must draw a firm line against accepting violence towards the police, he maintains. In his eyes, the poverty of the Roma should elicit sympathy from the French, but the state cannot tolerate the Roma camps’ insanitary and dangerous conditions on the fringes of its cities.

In 2010 the public targeting of Roma camps by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, ran into virulent opposition from the left. However, as a Socialist government embarks on the same course, the reaction is more muted. Some are even arguing that it is all different now, citing the less racially incendiary rhetoric of Mr Hollande and Mr Valls and the abolition of quotas for repatriation. But the policy is essentially the same. And those on the left are surprisingly quiescent. Christiane Taubira, justice minister and a member of the Radical Party of the Left (PRG), demurred when asked to compare Mr Valls’s policies to Mr Sarkozy’s.

It is unclear how successful Mr Valls’s policies are going to be in tackling crime. Violence on the outskirts of French cities is not the product of insufficiently firm policing but of the misery of life there. The recent designation of 15 priority security zones in high-crime areas of France, commencing in September, seems based more on hope than reason. It relies on greater local autonomy in crime fighting but with hardly any new resources on offer. It is unclear how partnerships between local stakeholders will address the underlying causes of crime.

The treatment of the Roma is also an advertisement of the need for new thinking. The dismantling of their encampments and repatriation of many of the inhabitants to Romania and Bulgaria has a curiously circular quality. In 2011 some 7,284 Romanians and 1,429 Bulgarians received aide du retour (typically a payment of €300 ($370) per adult) from the government in exchange for agreeing to go home. The programme’s cost of €26.6m may not be particularly expensive by the standards of French public policy but it still does not make much sense. If the worst outcome a poor Roma from eastern Europe faces on coming to France is a lump sum and a free ticket home, it may just make that initial trip all the more attractive. And this may explain why the Roma population of France has remained relatively stable, at between 15,000 and 20,000—despite thousands of deportations.